This is what 💜Community Care💜 looks like: narcan & naloxone in the bathroom at Crisis Club gallery in Oakland
(as well as organic cotton tampons, condoms, lube by the toilet!) #harmReduction#communityCare
Y'all, I know you want to live in a world where diseases don't exist, where you can go about your day without a care in the world.
But today is not that day. That world is not this reality.
I know you wish to live in ignorance of the thousands who die from disease (Covid in particular), the thousands more who end up permanently disabled, and the thousands that are now immuno-compromised.
But today is not that day. That world is not this reality.
I know you wish to pretend the increasing genocides, such as Gaza, Sudan, Congo, and others, aren't happening, so you can eat happily without worrying the hairs on your head. Despite the fact that tens of thousands are dying, where aid is being blocked, where colonizer states are lying through their teeth and not even trying to hide it.
But today is not that day. That world is not this reality.
I know you wish to chant to yourself that Climate Change isn't real and doesn't effect you. That the world isn't turning more hostile to life, so that you can continue to wander through your days without a care. Except, the weather turns more and more violent, where the permafrost melts and releases feedback gases, where the rivers start to run orange and red, where the sea levels rise, where millions are displaced, where hundreds of thousands are dying, where forest fires leave the sky a permanent orange or grey.
But today is not that day. That world is not this reality.
Ignoring reality doesn't make it go away. Pretending everything is just fine doesn't erase the horrors currently happening. Doing nothing doesn't help anyone, let alone you. This apathy is hurting all of us, so instead of falling prey to this falsehood, wake up.
Wake up and listen to those of us who fight for a better and more just present and future.
What does help? How do you rise up and avoid apathy and despair?
By talking with each other. By recognizing the horrors. By acknowledging the very real grief, by working through that grief with one another.
By supporting one another, by loving one another.
By rising up to stop the horrors through marching, political actions, writing campaigns, and other actions.
By pushing for more sustainable ways of being and fighting to get the policies passed and followed-through.
By demanding cease-fires and demanding aid to those in need.
By helping those who the pandemic has isolated and left to die -- getting them food, healthcare, support, and housing.
By building community gardens and sharing food with one another.
By holding forums for your community and talking through the needs of your community. By talking through solutions and finding an egalitarian way to implement them.
By building community with one another.
By building a community that fights fiercely to leave no one behind. To fight for a present and future where everyone has access to food, clean water, housing, healthcare, in-person and virtual support, and Internet/electricity. Where no one has to fear the bombs of another, where no one has to fear for their lives.
This is all possible. We can achieve such a just present and future.
But it requires work.
So will you put aside your yearning for a falsehood? Put aside your demand to return to a past that never really existed?
To instead, take my hand and fight with me for a present and future where we all are able to thrive and exist as we are without fear?
Because today is that day. Today is that day to fight for that reality.
We need to build better communities of care and support, desperately.
With how our society keeps refusing to acknowledge the pandemic (covid levels are so high in my state right now that it's dangerous to go out), it makes existing with other people even harder, and often disabled, marginalized folks like me get left behind. Forgotten, and it shouldn't be that way. It feels like the Left is so caught up with reacting to the Right's evils, that we've forgotten how to build up communities of solidarity and liberation.
We should be engaging in collective community care. We should be building that together and not eating up the isolating consumerist culture that late-stage-capitalism throws at us.
We need more media networks focused on building up communities of care and communities based on liberation. We need more support for our most vulnerable and to build that up for all people. We need to create alternate ways of giving and receiving that does not fall prey to the consumerist demands of capitalism. We need to support alternative ways of being that is focused on care, agency, creativity, cooperation, and liberation.
The right built up a powerhouse with its grassroots initiatives to an alarming extent, and it's how this mess we're in got worse.
Yes, we must tear down the racist, transphobic, xenophobic, ableist, homophobic, colonalist, sexist system -- but we must ALSO build up an alternative. We can do both at the same time. This isn't an either/or, and right now? We desperately need to build up that alternative because things are going to get worse if we don't stop all oil and coal use, if we don't stop the rise of fascism, if we don't stop the genocides. Climate change is currently intensifying the suffering, and those in power are using that intensification to consolidate fascism.
In the "Impossible Community: Realizing Communitarian Anarchism," John P. Clark wrote: "Over the past generation of radical social theory, we have heard a great deal more about the 'microphysics of power' than we have about the microecology of community. The dominance of the former approach is, I think, less a reflection of the inherent superiority of poststructuralist analysis than a symptom of the defensive nature of oppositional culture in our time. A heavy focus on the 'physics' of the system of power, and the depiction of social action in terms of various 'strategies' and 'tactics' shaped largely in reaction to this system betrays a certain level of capitulation to a dominant mechanistic, objectifying order. There has been a widespread assumption -- not only among post modernist and poststructuralist theorists, but also among political activists -- that the historical destiny of opposition is essentially a future of permanent struggle against the system of power. For many, the highest aspirations of oppositional culture seem to lie in small tactical gains within a fundamentally immovable system and in forms of enjoyment and creativity possible through struggles within the vast labyrinth of power."
Here Clark calls out the reactionary politics that the Left has fallen into, where we've lost that sense of community and instead react to the horrors with 'strategy' and tactics' without laying a groundwork of community to support one another through our process of dismantling a harmful system. This reactionary politics views the system as immovable and a fact of life, when it is anything but.
He writes: "The ideology of permanent struggle embodies some important truths about our creative resources in the face of dominations, but unless these truths are placed within a larger, more affirmative problematic, they easily become a recipe for disillusionment and nihilism. Such a larger problematic underlies the microecology of community. This approach undertakes a careful exploration of the nature and possibilities of community at the molecular level of society, and directs our hopes and efforts toward a project of regenerating human society and liberating human creative powers through engagement in that project. It sets out from the assumption that society, no matter how mechanized and objectified it may become, always remains an organic, dynamic, dialectically developing whole, the product of human creative activity in interaction with the natural world of which it is an inseparable part. Society is shaped by human thought, imagination, and transformative activity, and is not least of all, the result of the kind of primary relationships that humans beings enter into with one another."
Here Clark describes how community and the relationships we build with another shapes society. Without community and building relationships with one another, we fall prey to the false idea that liberation is only a struggle against domination -- an oppositional strategy. Except, that's not the full picture. Liberation is never just about a struggle against opposition. Liberation is about creating a community beneficial for all, an alternative to the dominant oppression, as well as a strategy/tactics that dismantle the oppression. It's a multifaceted approach that builds up more than it tears down.
Clark continues: "It has been suggested that the most immediate concern in a renewed radical politics must be the creation of strong, thriving communities of solidarity and liberation. Such a form of community is one that is engaged deeply in the quest for communal freedom..."
Our freedom cannot be realized without community.
He writes: "It is the process of replacing a system of domination of the person and community through force, violence, and coercion with a system of voluntary, mutualistic cooperation. It is the process of replacing the domination of the person and community through exploitation, manipulation, and instrumentalization for the sake of power with a system of personal and communal self-realization. And it is in the process of replacing the domination of the person and community through alienation and objectification with a system based on agency, self-determination, and free self-expression."
He provides a crucial call out on progressives: "The respectable Left long ago decided that this discourse [of liberation] was too dangerous, and decided to label itself and its aims as 'progressive.' It is no secret that 'progressive' was invented in part as a euphemism for 'liberal,' the political orientation that dares not speak its name. But the term has also become a generic label for virtually anything that is vaguely to the Left, or begins to look Left in a political culture increasingly dominated by the Right. Thus, the rise of 'progressivism' has been an eminently regressive development. The abandonment of terms such as 'women's liberation,' 'Black liberation,' and 'gay [LGBT] liberation,' has coincided with the marginalization of the remnants of what were once called 'freedom movements,' and the co-optation of their issues by the dominant political interests. In the end, the discourse of 'freedom' and 'liberty' has largely been conceded to conservatives and right-wing 'libertarians,' with lamentable consequences. The dominance of the negative, individualist concept of freedom as 'being left alone' goes almost unchallenged, while the positive, social concept of freedom as collective agency and participation in many-sided communal self-realization is seldom mentioned. It is in this context that the concept of the communities of solidarity and liberation takes on crucial importance."
This callout is really needed because we have ceded far too much to the right in regards to terms, communities, and approaches to society. If we truly wish to stop the rise of fascism and its subsequent genocides and oppression, then we need to do more than just react to the bad. We need to tear down at the same time we build up our own grassroots communities.
Clark continues: "It is essential that we look for inspiration for the emergence of such communities not only in certain neglected chapters in the long and diverse history of radical and revolutionary movements, but also in contemporary examples of grassroots, community-based social reorganizations across the globe. It is crucial that we understand how the successes of reactionary movements (and most notably those of the religious Right) have resulted in large part from their achievements in community buildings, in grassroots organizations, and in the creation of organizational forms that fulfill primary social needs. We must understand the way in which both successful liberation movements and successful reactionary ones have created small communities that embody a highly articulated set of values, ideas, beliefs, images, symbols, rituals, and practices, and integrated these communities into a large social movement."
Here Clark points out how the Left has neglected to examine the radical and revolutionary movements -- especially those in the Global South -- created a strong, liberatory community in their fight against oppression, and it is how they won those fights. Such as the 'Arabic Spring' that happened a decade or so ago, where strong communities of liberation toppled dictators. It wasn't reactionary politics that did that. It was a strong community built on solidarity and liberation, that provided for one another's primary needs, while also sharing a common foundation that intensifies that sense of belonging and collective care.
This is what we need to be building. This is what the Left desperately needs if we want to defeat the rise of the Fascist Right and their genocidal campaigns. Our foundation of care, solidarity, agency, communal self-realization, creativity, and liberation exists in the communities we build with one another, and provides us with the strength in which to stand up and tear down the systems of harm and oppression.
The world in general is just a painful place right now. There's a lot of collective horrors happening, and we really aren't given the means or space or time to properly grieve them as a community.
We need to create this space though. We need to grieve, and then fight to stop the horrors. It's not an easy fight, but we can stop these horrors if we work together.
Floating an exploratory balloon here...
If I was to fundraise to hire someone to help me build a #convalescentCommunities home in #guelph#ontario as a pilot project others could copy and customize around the world, would you kick in for that? If so ballpark amount?
Basically a long slow care home for #longCovid and #chonicIllness where folks can get the time out and care to stabilize and manage their illness.
I'd call it #turtleBower FYI, so we have a tag to centre discussion around.
What's on my mind at the moment is vaccines. I believe in science, and I believe vaccination is an important part of caring for myself, as well as those around me.
Back on July 25th, I received my Prevnar-20 vaccine against pneumonia. That one I didn't notice any side effects.
free COVID-19 rapid test kits in #philly#philadelphia to order for events or as a community org, takes about a week after ordering for pick up. heard about this from a Native person did an order of 2k of them for their orgs.
If you realize that staying under 1.5C is now a fantasy... and if you've learned enough to know that temperatures will almost certainly climb far higher than that within the next few decades... and if you've heard all you need to hear about climate and ecosystem tipping points... and if you understand that our modern hyper-connected just-in-time society exists on a knife edge, where any major interruption in any part of the supply chain can potentially bring everything down... and if you've therefore accepted that collapse is inevitable...
What do you do about it?
Each of us here will have to decide for ourselves. There are no right or wrong answers.
One option is to try to prepare, to become a "prepper." That might work for some people, but not for all of us.
In any case, whatever we choose, it would be ideal if we can search deep inside and find peace within ourselves. That's the message, I think, of this heartfelt essay from Alan Urban...
I am tired of stressing out because I’m not fully prepared. I’m never going to be fully prepared. No one is.
Even if you’re already living off the grid and fully self-sufficient, it’s only a matter of time before a climate disaster kills your crops or destroys your home.
If a doctor told me I had 5-15 years to live, would I spend all my free time searching for a treatment that would only buy me a few extra months?
Of course not! I would spend my time enjoying nature, playing games, listening to music, hanging out with friends and family, and going on little adventures with my kids.
What’s the point of surviving a little longer if you aren’t really living in the first place?
Sure, I could spend all my free time learning knots, canning fruit, drying herbs, cleaning guns, smoking meat, sewing clothes, growing mushrooms, making candles, building booby traps, using the ham radio, and so on and so forth — and I will do some of these things.
But if I’m being honest, most evenings I would rather watch a movie with my kids without feeling guilty that I’m not doing enough to prepare.
I’m tired of living in the future. I want to live in the now. I want to move beyond collapse awareness and into collapse acceptance. I don’t expect to get there all at once, but already I feel less burdened.
@breadandcircuses I've been reading "Scatter, Adapt, and Remember" by Annaee Newitz on how we might survive a mass extinction.
The one thing I am sure of - we can't do it as isolated individuals. We need to look to who our communities do (and don't) include and start relearning how to live cooperatively without hierarchy. #ClimateCrisis#CollectiveAction#CommunityCare
Mask Oakland is asking for donations to help with this year's fire season, including sending masks and air purifiers to rural and indigenous communities close to the California/Oregon border, and getting masks distributed here in the Bay for fire season and COVID precautions: https://maskoakland.org/give/ They also noted that today is a Spare the Air day in the Bay Area and that we'll likely be seeing some wildfire smoke impacts in the next few days.
They are also looking for volunteers to help distribute masks, and connections with people and organizations in affected areas.
If you haven't heard of Mask Oakland before, they've been around since 2017, distributing masks for wildfire smoke and COVID to homeless people and others in the Bay Area as well as the Sierras. They are extremely effective--to the point that city and county governments were relying on them at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, because they'd already been doing the work.
Y'all, I just found this very cool app that monitors air quality using citizen science sourced from a variety of different places. It seems to only be available for iPhones, which is a device I do not have, so I can't speak to how good it is, but it definitely seems to be another tool for the #solarpunk toolbelt of community care and knowledge. Anyone have experience with LocalHaze? Let us know! Has it been helpful to you this summer?
Can we build better mutual aid networks on the Fediverse?
We need to build better communities of care. @Tinu has been building an amazing network on Twitter for years, but now that's being shredded by the growing abuse and fascist queerphobic racists. But the network still sort of exists there, and it's why some people end up stuck over there, because the network here is scattered and unreliable.
If we want to build a more just, accessible, equal, and equitable future, then we MUST build up a supportive mutual aid community. One of care, where we leave no one behind.
Disabled folks rely on mutual aid and a network of support.
When people mock or demand people not "beg" for money or mutual aid, when you report our posts? That's all harmful and ableist. If people don't want to see our mutual aid posts, then use the tools within the fediverse softwares to create filters to block that content. Otherwise, leave us alone to build up or help us build up.
Disability payments often aren't enough to survive on even if we are able to get on it. (Some get trapped in endless reapplying for years despite having qualifying disabilities because the system is set up to deny, not aid us.)
So we rely on mutual aid to help keep us alive.
So either help us set this up or shut up and get out of our way please.
#SocialWork musings:
Sometimes I get overwhelmed by the amount of suffering and loneliness I see in my work. So many ppl have been abandoned by their families & communities, and walk through life alone. Survival is not enough. “Self care” is not enough. We need #CommunityCare
Self care™️ is cute and all but have we considered investing in community care????
Community care asks us:
Do we earnestly check in on folks?
Do we have the language to ask for help?
Is our intuition such that we understand when someone needs care?
Do we know our capacities?
Are we building relationships founded on reciprocity?
Have we created a community wherein holding space for one another is normalized?
If we understand that individualism, as popularly understood, is a capitalist ideal, and by proxy often an ableist one: has our conception of care shifted from the personal to the communal?
Currently selling these earrings that I've made with 925 silver hooks, to support a refugee family located in Greece. I have a number of pairs already made up, but alternatively, can make them in 74 different colours, 3 shapes (circle, triangle, square), & 2 sizes (40mm & 30mm). They come packaged in cardboard envelopes that can be re-used or recycled.
I also take orders for larger pieces, like the shawl pictured (not for sale- only shown for example). #MutualAid#CommunityCare#HandMade
Currently selling these earrings that I've made with 925 silver hooks, to support a refugee family located in Greece. I have a number of pairs already made up, but alternatively, can make them in 74 different colours, 3 shapes (circle, triangle, square), & 2 sizes (40mm & 30mm). They come packaged in cardboard envelopes that can be re-used or recycled.
I also take orders for larger pieces, like the shawl pictured (not for sale- only shown for example). #MutualAid#CommunityCare#HandMade
At the start of the pandemic things went pretty great. We saw many #MutualAid projects cropping up, people were shopping for each other, making and distributing masks etc. It would be presumptuous to claim that all these people were anarchists. Nevertheless such projects gave people hope. Could the pandemic, despite the humyn tragedy it represents, also be one of these moments in time when Mutual Aid and #CommunityCare could reach and maybe even convince the masses, that bottom up initiatives are fantastic and to implement them in opposition to the state makes a lot of sense.
But then the state seized its opportunity and started to use its enormous resources to implement some relatively decent policies, financial aid, eviction freezes, distribution of masks, tests, later vaccines and such. It seems to me, this had a deep impact on many anarchists. The state doing decent things for once, while, it has to be pointed out also expanding their overreach and control mechanisms, was feeding the wrong narrative and created confusion.
Many anarchists at this point turned their focus onto state overreach, understandably, or they started to fight the COVID-deniers, anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, even more understandably so. While, sadly, some "anarchists" joined the wrong side and could then be seen protesting along side neonazis and new ager conspiracy nuts against masks or what have you. This made the confusion even worse.
When the state started their process of normalizing this debilitating disease, and when what the Death Panel podcast has so aptly dubbed the sociological production of the end of the pandemic started, by running a vaccine only strategy, anarchists missed their chance to switch their focus yet again. This time back to communal care, to solidarity with the people most endangered by this awful disease (please believe me, i have #LongCOVID), by opposing the state, who started to herd everyone back into wage labor and consumption of goods. Instead anarchists just went along with the #ableist and ultimately #eugenic bullshit and were even some of the first to drop mask mandates at their events.
For comrades like myself, who had been debilitated by this insidious disease, who may still suffer from it, and who now just had to watch, sidelined, how they were now being excluded from participation, this was an almost even more devastating blow, than suffering from the disease itself.
To be clear, this will not be the last pandemic. The causes for zoonotic diseases (deforestation, intensive animal and industrial farming) have not been addressed. #COVID could have, no should have been! an opportunity to reach consensus on how we respond to a pandemic, starting within our community to then reach out to the masses.
We absolutely failed at this. Even in the analysis of the pandemic response very few interesting contributions came from our circles (many of the better ones came from socialists and marxists). Meanwhile many of the big anarchist writers remained stumm on the topic.
And for some of us, with a heavy heart, we are now in the process of moving away from #anarchy out of sheer disillusionment and disappointment.
It is time to grieve. It is time to scream. I am so done.